The Appeal Is Not Hard to Explain
Nayib Bukele did not invent the mano dura. Latin American politicians have been promising iron-fist security for decades — from Colombia's uribismo to Mexico's failed militarization under Felipe Calderón. What Bukele did was make it work fast enough, and visibly enough, to become a template. El Salvador's homicide rate, once among the world's highest, fell dramatically after his 2022 state of emergency. The images were designed for export: thousands of tattooed men marched into the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, hands bound, heads shaved. The message to the rest of the region was simple — decisiveness gets results.
The political contagion was swift. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa declared an internal armed conflict in early 2024 and sent troops into prisons after a wave of cartel violence that included a live broadcast hostage-taking at a state television station. His approval ratings climbed. In Honduras, President Xiomara Castro — elected on a left-leaning platform — nonetheless extended states of exception in gang-controlled municipalities. In Argentina, different politicians across the spectrum compete to sound toughest on crime in a country where insecurity polling consistently ranks among voters' top concerns. The mano dura has become less an ideology than an atmosphere.
The reason is not irrational. Citizens in many Latin American cities live with violence that most wealthy-country residents cannot imagine. Latin America records some of the world's highest homicide rates, even though the 2023 Global Peace Index did not rank it the least peaceful region. Impunity rates for violent crime routinely exceed ninety percent in several countries — meaning that for every ten murders, nine produce no conviction. When the formal justice system is that broken, visible force can feel like the only honest signal a government is sending.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
The problem is that "working" and "popular" are different things, and the gap between them is where policy lives.
El Salvador's numbers are real — but contested. Independent researchers and human rights organizations have documented mass arbitrary detentions: tens of thousands of people arrested without individual judicial review, many with no demonstrable gang link. The country's prisons are now the most overcrowded in the world by some measures. Reports of deaths in custody and torture have accumulated. Whether the drop in homicides reflects incapacitation of actual gang members, or a territorial accommodation between the government and MS-13 leadership — allegations that Bukele fiercely denies — remains genuinely disputed. The distinction matters enormously for whether the model is reproducible or merely a specific deal made in a specific context.
Ecuador illustrates the limitation more starkly. Noboa's military operations disrupted prison networks and generated political capital, but cartel violence restructured rather than disappeared: extortion, targeted killings and displacement of criminal activity continued. The state of emergency became a rolling fixture rather than a temporary shock. That pattern — emergency powers normalized, violence rearranging rather than retreating — has appeared in every major mano dura episode in the region's recent history. Calderón's Mexico left a cartel landscape more fragmented and more violent than the one he inherited. Peña Nieto's security approach changed the marketing, not the trend. The lesson embedded in thirty years of data is uncomfortable: suppression without institutional reform tends to displace violence rather than reduce it.
The institutions that would need to change — police forces with deep corruption problems, judiciary systems operating under political pressure, prison systems that often function as criminal universities — require sustained investment, political will that outlasts election cycles, and public patience for results measured in years rather than months. None of those are things security populism is designed to deliver. It is designed to deliver imagery: convoys, arrests, declarations of war. The imagery is real; the transformation underneath is not.
The Electoral Logic and Its Costs
The political durability of mano dura is partly explained by a coverage asymmetry. A dramatic arrest operation leads the news; the rights of the person wrongly detained barely register. A city that becomes somewhat safer generates no single image; a carjacking caught on phone camera goes viral. Politicians navigating that environment make rational choices about what to emphasize.
But the costs accumulate in ways that eventually become visible. Concentrated executive power over security — which all of these models require — tends to be used for purposes beyond combating crime. Bukele has used the state of emergency framework to suppress political opponents and independent journalism. In Guatemala, the outgoing government's security apparatus became a tool against the anti-corruption prosecution that brought Bernardo Arévalo to the presidency. The line between emergency powers for security and emergency powers for political control is rarely as clear in practice as it sounds in a campaign speech.
None of this makes voters wrong to want safety, or governments wrong to act on that demand. The region's violence is real, the suffering is real, and the failure of previous approaches — dialogue-only, negotiation, rehabilitation without enforcement — to deliver results created the opening that security populism now fills. The honest critique is not that force is never warranted, but that force without institutional repair is a performance of control, not its substance. Sooner or later, the gap between the two becomes a political problem of its own.